Impressive deep dive, this classic ASPLOS paper shows that early hardware virtualization support (like Intel VT-x) didn’t outperform VMware's binary-translated software VMM due to high VM‑exit overheads and rigid models/
The obvious takeaway? Flexible software optimizations often beat hardware if exits are too heavy or inflexible. Makes me wonder: with modern nested virtualization and microarchitectural improvements, are we finally seeing hardware VMMs that consistently match or exceed software VMMs?